The session on "Omar: Ethics, Power and Performativity" was about to begin, but Josine Opmeer, sitting at a low table in the lobby of Leeds town hall, had decided to give it a miss. Opmeer is the manager of the centre for research on socio-cultural change (Cresc) at the University of Manchester, which was co-hosting the event, but by the standards of this gathering, she was an outsider, an ingènue. She's only watched up to the end of season three.

"I finished it last night. I thought I'd better at least do that, but someone suggested there might be some spoilers in the presentation."

It was a reasonable assumption. For two days, more than 100 sociologists, criminologists, historians and cultural theorists from Britain and abroad came together in Leeds this week to discuss and debate a subject which had united them across sometimes jealously-guarded faculty and disciplinary borders: the HBO series The Wire.

Was the programme social science fiction or genre TV? Had it succeeded in its distillation of the US polity? Could Bourdieu's theoretical technologies help us in understanding its significance? In this gathering, mention of an obscure line of dialogue from an unremarkable incident in an early episode would meet with sage nods. Giving away what happens to McNulty, it is fair to say, was not their principal concern.

The Baltimore-based cop drama created by former local journalist David Simon, which ran for five seasons between 2002 and 2008, inspires an often unblinking devotion among its admirers – including, it has been argued once or twice, those at this newspaper. While the assembled academics may have taken a more minutely critical interest than many ("in examining Simon's phrase 'true citizens of the city', the word I want to focus on is 'the'."), there were plenty of passionate devotees among their number, giving the gathering the air of an impeccably-mannered fan convention, as much as an academic meeting.

"I'm just here as a geek, a massive fan," confessed Nilam McGrath, whose work at the University of Leeds focuses on media and the environment. "I started watching it during my final year of my PhD and I used to treat myself to an episode if I'd done 2,000 words of my thesis. Then it got to two episodes a night, then three. I know all the actors' backgrounds, I look for them in other films. I'm just completely obsessed with it."

Kersten Mueller from the University of London, Goldsmiths, having presented her paper arguing that the streets of Baltimore present the homosexual thief Omar with a canvas on which his performative identity can be projected, said season four was her favourite. "That one broke my heart. But you can't ignore season one because that's the initial connection you have. It's like a mother, the first bond."

For Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer the programme's appeal is based partly on sentiment – "I policed those corners, I love that city" – but he also credited it as being about 75% realistic, "which is good. And about 50% more realistic than any other cop show ever made." For the record: the police jargon is spot on; the Baltimore accents are atrocious; Hamsterdam, an area of the city in which drug-dealing is, briefly, decriminalised, an impossible fiction.

Being true academics, however, the gathering was nothing if not self-aware, returning to a theme referred to as "the fetishised currency of The Wire within the left-liberal discourse", but which might equally be summed up as "let's all remember it's not actually real, OK?"

Lessons learned

Works analysing The Wire include:

• A Man Must Have a Code: The Masculine Ethics of Snitching and Non-snitching – Thomas Ugelvik, University of Oslo

• The Writers' Room as Fiction-making Laboratory: The Wire as Sociotechnical Translation – John Farnsworth and Terry Austrin, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

• Non Text-based Sociology: The Wire and its Relationship to Public Sociology and Progress – Rowland Atkinson, University of York

• Ethics of the Real: Screening Masculinity, Violence and the Racial Everyday in The Wire – Ashwani Sharma, University of East London

• Music Supervision and The Wire: A Case Study in Ambient Naturalism – Jon Stewart, Lancaster University

• What The Wire Showed by Not Showing: The Invisibility of Domestic Violence in Disordered Neighbourhoods: Enrique Garcia, University of Valencia